The present invention relates to a motor vehicle bumper beam and to a bumper fitted with such a beam.
Motor vehicle bumper beams need to present a degree of rigidity in order to provide sufficient protection to passengers in the event of an accident.
For this purpose, it is the practice to make a beam out of materials that are strong, and in particular out of plastics materials that are reinforced with fibers, such as glass fibers.
To further improve the rigidity of a beam, its cross-section can be made to be non-rectilinear, both in order to increase its section and in order to form wedges that oppose bending of said beam.
Thus, by suitably selecting the material used and the shape of its cross-section, a satisfactory level of rigidity for the beam can be achieved quite effectively.
Nevertheless, such a beam may be of a shape that cannot be made by injection molding, or that is too complex to make by injection molding.
That is why the blow-molding method is sometimes preferred over the injection-molding method.
Nevertheless, injection molding is particularly advantageous in terms of cost and of quality criteria for the final beam, both mechanically and in terms of appearance. The beam is generally more accurate, i.e. of exactly the right dimensions and with a better finish when made by injection molding.
The difficulty of using injection molding to obtain bumper beams of relatively complex shape so as to present good rigidity is a problem which the present invention seeks to resolve.
To this end, the present invention provides a motor vehicle bumper beam characterized in that it comprises a longitudinal base element suitable for extending from one fixing point to another on the vehicle, and an additional element, the two elements being suitable for engaging one in the other and comprising snap-fastening means for providing rigid mechanical connection between longitudinal edges of said two elements.
Because of this rigid mechanical connection, the assembly constituted by the two inter-engaged elements presents rigidity that is greater than that of each of the two elements taken separately.
In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the snap-fastening means are constituted by chamfered tabs secured to a longitudinal edge of one of the elements, which tabs penetrate in orifices provided on a longitudinal edge of the other element.
The chamfers are preferably configured in such a manner that once the tabs are engaged in the orifices they can no longer be extracted therefrom. In other words, in this variant, the snap-fastening of the two inter-engaged elements is irreversible.
The bumper beam of the invention is designed to be fixed to the side rails of a vehicle, for example. To this end, at each of its ends it has points on the longitudinal base element for fixing to said side rails.
In a first embodiment of the invention, the additional element extends from one fixing point to the other and has its own fixing points for fixing to the vehicle.
In another embodiment of the invention, the additional element extends only over a limited fraction of the longitudinal base element.
According to a particular characteristic of the invention, one or each of the two elements includes reinforcing ribs.
Such ribs are distributed, possibly at varying density, over the entire length of each element.
For example, the density of ribs is advantageously higher in the regions of the elements that are in register with the side rails.
In particularly advantageous manner, at least one of the two elements is prestressed by being engaged with the other element in a prestress direction that is perpendicular to the expected impact direction, so as to press the two elements against each other and prevent vibration being generated.
For example, if the geometrical configuration of the two elements is such that after being mutually engaged one of the elements contains the other, then the outer element, i.e. the element containing the other element, can be configured in such a manner that at rest it presents two side flanges between which the inner element is engaged, these two flanges leaving between them a space that is slightly smaller than the corresponding dimension of the inner element, such that inter-engagement causes the two side flanges to be spaced apart, thereby prestressing the outer element.
The beam of the invention presents the advantage of having geometrical and mechanical characteristics that are easily adapted to the vehicles for which it is intended.
The beam can be adapted mechanically by selecting an additional element that provides extra rigidity in an amount that depends on the weight and the equipment level of the vehicle in question.
The additional element can also make it possible to adapt the beam to the particular shape of a bumper shield. In which case, it is possible to make standard longitudinal base elements which are associated with additional elements that are shaped geometrically in a manner that is specific to each model of vehicle.
In a particular embodiment of the invention, the additional element serves not only to increase the rigidity of the assembly, but also to provide a specific impact-absorbing function, for example absorbing impacts against pedestrians, referred to briefly as xe2x80x9cpedestrian impactsxe2x80x9d.
Under such circumstances, it is advantageous in a particular variant to provide clearance between the two assembled-together elements in the expected impact direction so as to enable the additional element to perform its pedestrian impact absorbing function before the longitudinal base element becomes involved in the impact.
In a particular embodiment of the invention, the longitudinal base element presents a W-shaped section and the additional element presents a channel section, the additional element being designed to fit over the longitudinal base element.
More generally, it is advantageous for the longitudinal base element to present at least one convex portion and for the additional element to present at least one concave portion suitable for receiving the longitudinal beam element or at least the convex portion thereof.
In a particular variant, the beam has mechanical means for preventing the outer element from separating in the event of the assembly of inter-engaging elements being subjected to external stress, so as to guarantee that even in the event of an impact said assembly maintains its high second moment of area that results from inter-engaging the two elements, and performs well mechanically.
By way of example, such mechanical means can be a geometrical configuration of the two elements in which the two elements alternate between being the inner element and the outer element in a cross-section of the beam and on going from one end of the beam to the other.
By means of such a configuration, the inner element which is prevented from moving away by the outer element in a given section of the beam becomes in turn the inner element which is prevented from moving away from the outer element in another section of the beam.
More generally, if the inter-engagement of the two elements is such that neither of them can ever be considered as being the outer element or the inner element, then the geometrical configuration is such that the relative positions of the two elements are interchanged at least once between two cross-sections of the beam.
Another advantage of such a geometrical configuration lies in the fact that between two sections in which the relative positions of the two elements are interchanged, at least one of the elements has transition portions forming transverse bearing surfaces which constitute means for centering the two elements that are engaged one relative to the other.
In accordance with the invention, each of the two beam elements may be made of any material. For example, a material that is suitable for use in the invention is polypropylene, and more generally it is possible to use any injectable thermoplastic material, an alloy of thermoplastic materials, or a metal alloy of aluminum or of steel.
Which material it is most appropriate to select naturally depends on the mechanical characteristics desired for the beam.
The present invention also provides a motor vehicle bumper including a bumper beam as described above.